CCP built installer random failures on OSX

[MarkGerk]

We built and deployed (via Munki) a full CC master collection in late August to all of our labs here at a college, but we're now running into issues that we hadn't realized happened at deploy time.  Quite a lot of the installs seem to randomly fail on certain packages -- namely we're ending up with machines that don't have AIR, Desktop Publishing Tools and Flash Player.

To test things further now that there have been some updates we are building new packages to update and/or deploy as required, but now we're seeing other random failures both when trying to deploy via Munki or manually installing by hand.  These are failures that I've never seen before, like the OSX installer just stopping with the progress bar showing it being less than half way through the install and the button at the bottom right simply showing "Close".

The logs haven't been any kind of help in this so far, I cannot find any actual failures.  When deploying via Munki things all show up that they are installed with no issues, when doing it manually I looked through all of the logs I could find for the installs and didn't see any failures (but all of the installs didn't run).

I'm not sure where we can turn from here, we are in a bit of a stick place right now as our old install mostly works (it often fails at 124 or 127 pkgs in the payload) and any new builds we try to install don't even make it half way through the install.  We've done the CCP builds on different machines, etc but end up with the same results.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to actually deploy the full master suite and updates in an educational environment?  We do need AIR and AIR based installs as a bunch of our curriculum requires DPS Tools.  Last week I spent days manually installing AIR and related tools on a ton of lab machines (they would fail if the GUI wasn't running when the install happened even following Adobe's directions).

Any help of suggestions would be appreciated.

[MarkGerk]

And of note to add to the conversation, the "random" part of the failures if that in one lab, for example, we deployed 27 machines with the exact same Master Collection package that was built with CCP and on almost 2/3 of the machines it failed at pkg 124 (adobe AIR), but on other machines it all ran fine.  None of the machines showed a single error anywhere in the logs but the machines that failed are missing components (namely and most visibly in the /Applications/Adobe folder there is only an AdobePatchFiles folder (and no Adobe Content Viewer or Flash Player).

[MarkGerk]

Another note to add to this issue, I think I'm getting closer to figuring out some of the lower level issues here.  CCP is building multiple packages for us (both when we build a single package or when we build one-off packages per product) that are using the same mediaSignature.

Just guessing but I think this is probably the root of all of the issues we're having here.  When using Munki it certainly is, after some digging in the source it seems like Munki is using the mediaSignature as a sort of unique identifier.  Not sure if this is related to the failed manual installations yet ...

Just talking to myself here ... carry on folks

[jpeters36]

im failing out with a manual install of the pkg, on multiple machines. the log file shows an error on "un-intsall installation not present" and yes i am selecting the install package, wondering if the packager is corrupted ive recreated it twice now so its not just a corrupted package

[Patrick Fergus]

MarkGerk,

  Did you get this figured out?  I have a roundabout way that appears to reliably install DPS Desktop Tools for InDesign CC2014, but I'm not sure if it would help InDesign CC or not.

[PSISRAEL]

I would love to hear the workaround if possible, I'm trying out CCP for the first time and seem to have the same random-failure problem on certain machines.

[Patrick Fergus]

CCP 1.7 on the Mac starts with the most conservative settings (ignore conflicting processes, do not install AIR-based components).  Are you changing those settings?  More details are needed.

[MarkGerk]

Yes we've set it to install AIR applications (as we need them), but they consistently fail.  We've also been trying without AIR applications and things still consistency fail (in seemingly random places).  At this point we've mostly given up on using CCP to deploy things and may have to revert to older methods of deploying the Adobe CC software.

[Patrick Fergus]

Have you examined using AutoPkg to deploy AIR?  In other words, skip AIR in the CCP pkgs, but use the AutoPkg-generated AIR installer for the AIR framework itself?  Installing AIR inside CCP pkgs deployed by Munki can lead to unusual behavior, since Munki includes specific code to squash Adobe installer processes that are known to hang.

Join ##osx-server Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or email the munki-dev mailing list with questions, especially regarding Munki versus CCP.  I have an Adobe-provided but unsupported workaround for installing DPS Desktop Tools for InDesign CC 2014--it might possibly help you as well.

[MarkGerk]

We have currently deployed separate AIR and DPS packages.   The ongoing issue we are having though is the random failures with CCP built installers (even when they are run manually and not with munki).

I've been on the munki-dev list asking about these specific CCP built package failures and have gotten some advice from Greg in terms of the munki end of things in regards to CCP packaged installs and have sorted out the majority of our issues, but the problems we're having now are not munki related, but CCP related.  Even when manually running CCP built installations they fail randomly (but consistently) on clean OSX installations.  Sometimes they eventually time out, most times they just hang part way through the install process and don't give the Installer any further feedback.  I tested 4 packages (built across a couple of different machines) on 4 fresh OS installs and not one of them completed properly, two of them failed in the same spot (and didn't provide any feedback, just sat there for days) and the other two didn't install all the items but at least told the OSX Install app that they failed.

The only thing we have been able to do here and get consistent results with is to install a much older pkg we built that _mostly_ works (fails at AIR, payload 124 of 127) and then manually install the missing bits, and then run RUM ro update from our local RUM server.  Messy but it's working for now.

I think Adobe has some work to do on their CCP packaged items specifically.  From some quick searching I can tell that we're not alone with these issues but honestly at this point I'm tired of being an unpaid beta tester for Adobe and wasting so much time jumping through all the hoops they want us to jump through to "test" their failed installers.

[Patrick Fergus]

You're encountering a lot more issues than I am. The differences I see:

- Early releases of CCP 1.6 didn't block DPS Desktop installers properly, you might have hit that?

- I'm installing CC 2014 pkgs rather than CC pkgs

- All my CCP pkgs (except DPS Desktop Tools) have a "RestartAction" of "RequireLogout"

- I'm adding updates by exporting new CCP update-only pkgs, rather than using aamporter

- I broke the CCP pkgs into one software title per pkg

Sorry I can't be of more assistance.

[MarkGerk]

Thanks for trying.  We're install CC2014 packages.  We've tried combined pkgs and single pkgs and have had issues with both of them.  The single pkgs seem to work a little better as at least then we know where failures happen, but they are not consistent.  Using RUM is still the only real way to go for us here, at least once we've got a base installed.  It mostly does what it's supposed to do -- even though sometimes it takes 3-4 attempts for some pkgs to actually update properly.  We have also had instances where some machines just will not run certain updates -- which usually requires us to reimage the whole machine.

It was so much easier with CS6   CC has been a royal pain for us to date.

[jpeters36]

pain for us here to... honestly i packaged the app on the same model I was going to install it on and it worked... I don't understand it what so ever. In moving to the "Cloud" (which the only thing in the cloud is some preference settings) Adobe has just disregarded all their business users